1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to audio processing. More specifically, the present invention relates to repairing corrupted audio signals.
2. Related Art
Audio signals can comprise a series of frames or other transmission units. An audio signal can become corrupted when one or more frames included in that audio signal are damaged. Frames can be damaged as a result of various events that are often localized in time and/or frequency. Examples of such events include non-stationary noises (e.g., impact noises, keyboard clicks, door slams, etc.), packet losses in a communication network carrying the audio signal, noise burst leakage caused by inaccurate noise or echo filtering, and over-suppression of desired signal components such as a speech component. These events may be generally referred to as ‘dropouts’ since a desired signal component is lost or severely damaged in one or more frames of a given audio signal.
In many applications such as telecommunications, corruption in an audio signal can be an annoyance or a distraction, or, worse yet, a drastic impairment of critical communication. Even in systems with noise suppression capabilities, damaged frames can be audible in a processed signal by a user since such noise suppressors are typically too slow to track highly non-stationary noise events such as dropouts. Therefore, there is a need to repair audio signals that are corrupted by damaged frames.